Thursday, April 10, 2014

[Interview] Down with Burn the Sun

Welcome to Downtuned

Tell us a few words about the group, when and where did you get started? How did you meet?

Well the story goes a little like this. Fotis (guitars) and Angelos (percussion) were in the same high school. At some point we became aware of each others musical interests and we said ‘you know what?’ lets start a band. Soon we were joined by Angelo’s brother Stamatis (guitars, vocals). We spent around two years jamming in Angelos attic basically learning how to play our instruments and function as a band. Even back then we were more interested in creating our own music rather than playing covers. At last the band was complete with the inclusion of our first bass player Andreas. With the line up complete we started playing some small gigs witch led us to playing Schoolwave in 2011, a great festival focused on bands around school age. Back then we were called ‘Scapegoat’, more of a middle ground than name since we couldn’t agree on something else. After that festival our sound started to change, becoming more mature and unique, or so we like to tell ourselves. This is when we changed our name to ‘Burn the Sun’ and recorded our first demo. Since then the bass guitar duties have fallen to the worthy hands of George, we continued playing gigs, creating more music and trying to find a musical identity. Couple of months ago we finished the recordings of our second EP ‘Crack of Dawn’ at Unreal Studioz which is now in the stage of mastering and it’s coming out really soon.

Which are your musical influences?

Individually there is a great number of bands and musical styles that we have in common but also a great deal of those which have nothing to do with each member or with the music we are playing. We love the 70s and their rock giants, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd which are really big influences to us, more heavy stuff like Black Sabbath. Then comes the 90s with Alice in Chains, Kuyss, Down reaching the past decade and the present with bands like Mastodon, Tool, Clutch, Baroness, Kylesa, The Ocean, Crippled Black Phoenix and of course our local Greek scene (Nightstalker, Planet of Zeus, 1000mods, etc). The goal is to combine all this similar or different influences in our music without any limits or dos and don'ts.

What’s your lyrics about? What catches your interest?

There is no some theme or anything we have agreed of. Each member writes it’s thoughts, it’s problems and it’s opinion about every days life, personal issues, relationships, politics or anything. However there is an anthropocentric core theme which is not happening on purpose. It Just come’s up like this naturally. Also books and movies are a great inspiration too. Everything we write has it’s meaning for us but we are also trying to give a free ‘space’ so the listener can understand the central idea and actually adapt all this to his personal problem, thoughts or ideas.

Is the communication with the crowd something that you care about, in all levels, or do you do music for yourselves?

Its actually both but with a certain row. We are playing and we are writing songs starting with the fact we love music and we are having fun doing this. That’s the start. Then we want to share all this musical and lyrical messages we got, having fun on and off the stage, with people we know or not. That’s it and not the other way round.

Do you feel like you’re a part of a particular “scene” in which you would like to join and contribute or you are indifferent about it?

Right now we are part of the Greek Underground scene and it’s pretty awesome. We played with a lot of great bands and made good friends .

How do you imagine that the band will be in ten years from now?

That’s a pretty hard guess but we hope we will be touring around the world, playing the music we like and having fun with people.

Which famous artist you would like to do a guest to a record of yours and why?

Lot’s of guys on the list and each one of us a lot to write. Brent Hinds from Mastodon would be a great and interesting guest, we love his odd guitar style and his strange way of singing. John ‘the man’ Garcia of course which is a great influence to us or Neil Fallon (Clutch) with his unique way of singing. Also John Maynard Keenan (Tool) is a great and unique singer, would be an interesting guest. John Baizley could do a cover or something except playing or singing, that would be great, we love his work and especially his drawings. And many, many more.

What plans do you have for the near future?

These days we are having a semi-break because our drummer Aggelos is off for his military duty. There are some gigs on the making for this summer and a small Greek tour with great friends in this year’s fall. There are new songs and a great number of ideas on the making, so we actually already started working for our first full length album.

We wish you good luck to whatever you’re doing, the epilogue is yours.

We would like to thank you for this interview!

Our great love and a huge thanks to all the people supporting us on this trip.